1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and apparatus for managing bearers in a radio communication system, and more particularly, to a bearer management method and apparatus for use in a beamforming-based radio communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the rapid popularization of wireless Internet communication devices, such as smartphones, the demand for mobile data dramatically grows by about 50% to 200% annually. In order to meet the rapid increasing demand for the mobile communication data, various data rate enhancement technologies have been developed. One of the most promising data enhancement methods is to broaden the frequency band, which is difficult to achieve due to the limited frequency spectrum allocated for mobile communication systems. It is not difficult to secure a relatively large frequency band of about a few hundreds of MHz to a few GHz in the frequency range of 28 GHz, 38 GHz.
However, the radio signal is characterized in that its strength attenuation increases as the frequency increases, and thus, although it is used for radio communications, the significant signal attenuation of ultra-high frequency (28 GHz or beyond), restricts the cell size and service area. In contrast, since the antenna decreases in size as the frequency increases, it is facilitated to integrate a plurality of antenna devices into an array in the ultra-high frequency range for beamforming to achieve high beamforming gain.